Ash: A Secret History (200 page)

Subject: Ash

Date:    25/12/00 at 03.01 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

Are you downloading your mail? Are you reading your mail? Is anybody reading this?

– Anna

  Message: #250 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    25/12/00 at 07.16 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

These messages must be stacking up. For God’s sake answer.

– Anna

  Message: #251 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    25/12/00 at 09.00 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

I have been phoning the British Embassy. I _finally_ got through. No one there is prepared to give me any information. The university switchboard is closed, I can’t get a contact number for Isobel Napier-Grant. I can’t get through to you. No news station wants to know: it’s the holiday. Please ANSWER ME.

– Anna

PART SIXTEEN

26 December AD 1476–5 January AD 1477

Lost Burgundy
¹

I

“And now,” Ash said, “you need to order
my
execution.”

Light leaked through the unshuttered windows into the ducal chambers – the feast of Stephen dawning late, to a blistering cold. Freezing damp infested the air, penetrating any bare skin; draughts blew in around the shutters and hangings.

“Are you
sure
you hear them?” Florian persisted.

‘
IT REQUIRES NOTHING BUT TIME NOW
:
OUR TIME FAST APPROACHES
—’

“Yes, I’m sure!” Ash banged her sheepskin mittens together, hoping for feeling in her numb fingers.

“Have you told anyone else yet? That the end of the
machina rei militaris
means nothing?”

“No. I didn’t want to spoil their party.”

“Ah.” Florian attempted a smile. “
That’s
what it was. I thought it was a night attack by the Visigoths…”

Her colour altered, and she leaned one arm up against the wall for support, the thin grey light of the dawn illuminating her. The velvet hem of her gown trailed across bare flagstones – no rushes, now. She did not wear the hart’s-horn crown, but the carved Briar Cross hung at her breast, half-lost in her unpointed doublet and the yellow linen of her shirt. Over everything, she wore a great robe made from wolf-pelts, heavy enough to weigh down a man.

“You look rough,” Ash said.

With the growing light, Ash saw that the wall against which the surgeon leaned was painted – richly, as becomes a royal Duke – with figures of men and women and tiny towns on hilltops. Each of the figures danced hand in hand with another: cardinal, carpenter, knight, merchant; peasant, tottering old man, pregnant girl, arid crowned king. Bony hand in their hands, white skeletons led them off, all equal, into death. Florian del Guiz leaned her forehead against the cold stone, oblivious, and rubbed at her stomach under her furs.

“I spent half the night in the garderobe.” An obvious recollection of the slaughter that had made her drink went across the tall woman’s features. “We have to send my brother back to Gelimer today. With an answer that won’t have us attacked before evening. Now
this
…”

Ash watched Florian pace down the chamber, further from the hearth around which – since it held the palace’s remaining substantial fire – the Duchess was allowing her servants to huddle and sleep.

She forced her mind not to listen to the yammering triumphant whispers of the Wild Machines; followed.

“No—” Florian put up a hand. “
No.
Your execution would be as irrelevant as the Faris’s.” Her thin face relaxed into a smile. “Stupid woman. You spent time telling me why she shouldn’t die. What about you? What’s different?”

“Because it isn’t her, it’s me.”

“Yes, I think I have realised that,” the scarecrow-thin woman said ironically, and looked at Ash with warm eyes. “After an hour and a half of you going on at me.”

“But—”

“Boss,
shut up.
”

“It isn’t her, it’s me, and I don’t need the Stone Golem—” Ash’s voice changed.

“If I order your death, I’ve lost the Pucelle, ‘the She-Lion of Burgundy’, the Maid of Dijon—”

“Oh, fucking
hell!
”

“Don’t blame me for your public image,” Florian snapped, with asperity. “
As
I was saying. We need you. You told me the Faris was irrelevant; because Burgundy’s bloodline has to survive way beyond her death. Now it has to survive beyond yours! I’m sorry that destroying the
machina rei militaris
didn’t make a difference.” Her expression altered. “God knows, I’m sorry about Godfrey. But. I need you in the field more than I need you dead.”

“And this makes no difference?”

“I’m not going to order your death.” Florian del Guiz looked away. “And don’t get any stupid ideas about going out on to the field and getting the enemy to do it for you.”

For all its high vaulted roof and pale stone, the ducal chamber pressed in on Ash with acute claustrophobia. She walked to the window and looked at the ice on the inside of it.

“You’re running too great a risk,” Ash said. “This city is on the verge of being overrun. If you’re killed— You needed my sister for what she knows. There’s a dozen commanders here as good as me!”

“But they’re not the Pucelle. Ash, it doesn’t matter what
you
think you are. Or if it’s justified.”

Florian came to stand beside her at the stone embrasure.

“You didn’t come here expecting me to have you marched off and executed. You know I won’t. You didn’t come here for me to tell you to kill yourself.” Her eyes slitted against the southern glare. “You came here for me to talk you out of it. For me to
order
you to live.”

“I did not!”

“How long have I known you?” Florian said. “Five years, now? Come on, boss. Just because I love you doesn’t mean I think you’re
bright.
You want someone else to take responsibility for telling you to stay alive. And you think I’m dumb enough not to notice that.”

Wind from the ill-fitting edges of the window bit into her. The sheepskin huke belted over armour and gown barely warmed her, no more than the coif over her shorn head, under her hood. Ash said, “Maybe it’s just as well I can’t love you the way you want. You’re too smart.”

Florian threw her head back and guffawed loudly enough to make the servants around the hearth stare down the chamber at them.

“What?” Ash demanded. “
What?
”

“Oh, gallant!” Florian spluttered. “Chivalrous! Oh – fuck it. I’ll take it as a compliment. I’m beginning to feel sorry for my brother.”

Bewildered, Ash repeated, “
What?
”

“Never mind.” Florian, eyes glowing, touched Ash’s scarred cheek with fingers as cold as frost-bitten stone.

No sensuality was transmitted by that cold touch. What Ash felt answering it, in herself – what stopped her speaking, except for a confused mutter – was a wrenching non-physical desire for closeness. She realised suddenly,
Agape
.
²
Agape, Godfrey would call it: love of a companion. I want to give her trust.

I trusted Godfrey, and look what happened to him.

“You’d better call people up here,” Ash said, “and we’d better talk to them.”

As Florian sent messengers, she scratched with mittened fingers at the ice on the inside of the glass, clearing a patch on the ducal window and peering out. Lemon-yellow, actinic: the sun just cleared the horizon, casting blue-white shadows on the peaked roofs of Dijon below. The valley beyond the walls lay thick with frost.

Long shadows fell away from the sunrise, into the west. Every turf hut, tent, and legion eagle put a blue-black silhouette across the frost. Out on the white brittle ground, men of the III Caralis were beginning to move around: foot units marching sluggishly towards the siege trenches, a squad of cavalry galloping across towards the eastern river and the bridge behind Visigoth lines.

Is that a deployment? Or are they just harassing us?

You could not see, from here, what lay in the dead ground between Dijon’s north gate and the Visigoth siege-lines.

But I doubt they’ve cleared up yesterday’s bodies. Why would they? Far worse for our morale to leave them there to look at.

With no particular hurry, the red granite façades of golem-machinery creaked towards the walls.

“Not an assault yet,” Ash guessed. “He’s just trying to provoke you into complaining they’re breaking the truce.”

Ash snapped her fingers for a page. A boy brought a white ash bowl, steaming with the mulled cider presented, by Dijon’s vintners, in lieu of the wine they no longer had. When he had served the surgeon-Duchess, Ash took a bowl, welcoming the heat of it. She turned back to the window, nodding towards the distant encampment.

“We’ve got their commander. There’s not much we don’t know about them, at the moment,” Ash said dispassionately. “Like, we know they can afford to gallop their cavalry. The Faris tells me they’ve got fodder to spare. Not that I’d do it on that ground, myself – must be rock-hard.” She paused.

“If I were Gelimer, and
my
army commander had gone over to the enemy, I’d be running around now like a bull with its tail on fire, trying to remove any weaknesses in my deployment before I attacked. So we’ve got a window of opportunity, before he can.”

“Christ,” Florian said behind her. “I have six thousand civilians in this city alone. I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the country. I’m their Duchess. I’m supposed to
protect
them.”

Ash looked away from the window. Florian was not drinking, only cupping her cold hands around the bowl. The scent of spices made her stomach growl, and Ash lifted her own bowl, and drank. She felt the warmth of it flood her body.

She wanted to put her arm around Florian’s shoulders. Instead, Ash lifted her bowl in salute, giving her a grin that was an embrace.

“I know exactly what we do next,” Ash said. “We surrender.”

The wind took her breath away; so cold that her teeth hurt behind firmly closed lips. A north wind. Her eyes leaked water that froze on her scarred cheeks. Ash moved down off the north wall, into the faint shelter afforded by the walls of the Byward Tower.

“You’re right.” Florian spoke in clipped words. “No one’s going – to overhear us. Not out there.”

“The Wild Machines might hear me…” Ash’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a grin. “
But who are they going to tell?
”

“Bad place – for a war council.”

“Best place.”

“Boss, you’re a loony!”

“Yes – your Grace!” Ash steadied her sword against her armoured hip. “Fuck me backwards, it’s cold!”